July 28, 2008

The ring of truth

The Obama campaign, flush with cash, is spending record amounts of money on big media buys in states like Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Colorado and Michigan, but the latest polls show that, if anything, the polling in these states has either changed little or the Arizona Republican has narrowed the gap in them.

McCain strategists told The Washington Times that they have been closely monitoring the large amounts of cash that Mr. Obama is spending on TV ads in these and a dozen other competitive states to see whether they were moving the Illinois senator's numbers in the race.

"So far we're not seeing any evidence that they have had any measurable impact," said a top McCain campaign official on the condition of anonymity.

McCain campaign officials say their own polls show that for all his spending, "Obama's numbers haven't budged a bit."

Instead, a Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters in four of these states, taken July 14 to 22, showed Mr. McCain has picked up support "in almost every group in every state, especially among independent voters and men," the polling group reported last week.

John McCain has made the Iraq war the centerpiece of his election campaign, convinced that it is the single most important issue that America faces. While other candidates have treated the Iraq war as a political death wish, McCain has said said on several occasions that he would rather lose the campaign than the war. As it turned out, it's been a winning campaign message. According to the Washington Post reports McCain has turned up the heat.

McCain, a supporter of the war in Iraq who later criticized the way it was waged and supported sending more troops there, said he based his own approach to the war on principle, while Obama developed a strategy aimed at appealing to voters. "I say that it was very clear that a decision had to be made, and I made it when it wasn't popular. He made a decision which was popular with his base. And that is a fundamental difference," McCain said in a taped interview on ABC.

He took his argument a step further on CNN, saying that Obama's support for a withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months would squander the efforts of Americans who died fighting the war there.

"I'm not prepared to see the sacrifice of so many brave young Americans lost because Senator Obama just views this war as another political issue with which he can change positions," McCain said.

McCain's new ad questions why Obama decided to exercise during a stopover in Germany late last week rather than visit wounded soldiers. In the ad, a narrator says that Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops." The ad continues: "Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras. John McCain is always there for our troops. McCain -- country first."

The effectiveness of McCain's ad campaign remains to be seen, but the reaction from the Obama campaign argues that it will be a winner.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said that McCain is not living up to the standards he set out at the outset of the general-election campaign, when he repeatedly called for a "civil" and "respectful" debate. "John McCain is an honorable man running an increasingly dishonorable campaign," Vietor said. "I think a lot of people are wondering what happened to the civil campaign John McCain said he was going to run."

In fact Obama's position is indefensible. Obama went on record to oppose any attempt to win the war when he opposed the surge that won it. Now even the New York Times and the Associated Press concede that the war is won, but Obama still urges that we lose it by promising to withdraw troops according to a 16-month timetable. The Obama campaign has no choice but to attack McCain's "civility" or else try and defend the indefensible.